It usually is not.
A drainage easement does not hate you.
A fire code does not disrespect you.
A property boundary does not care whether you are important.
Procedure is often frustrating precisely because it is supposed to work without considering who you think you are.
Dana had never accepted that.
She believed authority meant the ability to change the answer.
When the city refused, she tried to make Darius feel the same helplessness she imagined she had felt.
The difference was that Darius had never been her enemy.
She created one because it gave her frustration a face.
Epilogue
Five years after that first cookout, Ava graduated from high school.
Renee held the celebration in the same backyard.
There were probably fifty people.
Maybe more.
Nobody counted.
Music played from the deck.
Two grills smoked beneath the pergola.
Loretta, now eighty-six, sat beneath an umbrella criticizing everybody’s cooking while contributing none of her own.
Darius stood near the grill.
Still pretending not to supervise.
Ava walked toward him wearing her graduation dress.
“You know Mom made me promise not to record anything today.”
“Smart.”
“She says our family has contributed enough surveillance evidence to the justice system.”
“She may be right.”
Ava smiled.
Then looked toward the side gate.
For a brief moment, Darius knew they were both remembering the same afternoon.
Dana walking through.
Clipboard first.
Then later the bat.
Police entering.
The ruined table.
The fear.
But the gate looked ordinary now.
A new wooden latch.
A flowering vine climbing one side.
Nothing about it announced history.
That was good.
Places do not need to remain monuments to the worst thing that happened there.
Ava looked at him.
“Do you ever think about what would’ve happened if Mom wasn’t recording?”
“Yes.”
She waited.
He did not elaborate.
Some possibilities did not improve with repetition.
Instead, Darius looked around the backyard.
Renee laughing with cousins.
Marcus carrying another tray from the kitchen.
Loretta arguing with a teenager over whether bottled barbecue sauce counted as cooking.
Children running through the same patch of grass where police once photographed a baseball bat.
“We had evidence,” he said.
Ava nodded.
“But what if we didn't?”
Darius thought for a moment.
“Then I hope the officers would still have done their jobs well.”
“But you don't know.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“That’s scary.”
“Yes.”
Then he added:
“That’s why systems matter.”
Ava frowned.
“You always turn everything into government.”
“I’m literally the city manager.”
“You know what I mean.”
He laughed.
Then he became serious.
“People shouldn’t need the perfect video, the perfect witness, or an important job title to be treated fairly.”
Ava nodded.
“That was kind of what you said back then.”
“It was true back then.”
“It still is.”